Adrienne Fairhall is a University Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and an adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Mathematics, as well as the director of the Computational Neuroscience Program and co-director of the Institute for Neuroengineering at the University of Washington.

Fairhall is primarily known for her work on dynamic neural computation, particularly with regards to the interplay between cellular and circuit dynamics and coding, and she has received numerous awards for her work in the field including a Sloan Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Burroughs-Wellcome Fellowship, and an Allen Distinguished Investigator award.

Fairhall presently runs the Fairhall laboratory at the University of Washington.^[1]

Early life and education

Fairhall was raised in Australia, she obtained her honors degree in theoretical physics working with Robert Dewar at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.^[2] She then joined the lab of Itamar Procaccia at the Weizmann Institute of Science where she completed her PhD in physics.^[3]

Career

Following a brief stint at the NEC Corporation, Fairhall then joined Princeton University's Department of Molecular Biology as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2004, she left that position to become an associate professor at the University of Washington, a position that eventually led to a full professorship. She further went on to become the director of the University of Washington Computational Neuroscience Program and co-director of the University of Washington Institute for Neuroengineering^[4][5]

Fairhall has also been involved in a number of computational neuroscience educational programs and workshops, most notably by way directing the Methods in Computational Neuroscience course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, as well as creating the Coursera course on the subject.^[6]

Personal life

Fairhall is married to Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a physicist whom she met during a neural network circuitry class at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and with whom she has two children.^[7]

Select publications

• Fairhall, A.L.; Lewen, G.D.; Bialek, W.; de Ruyter van Steveninck, R.R. (23 August 2001). "Efficiency and ambiguity in an adaptive neural code". Nature. 412 (6849): 787–792. Bibcode:2001Natur.412..787F. doi:10.1038/35090500. PMID 11518957. S2CID 4354013.
• Lundstrom, B.N.; Higgs, M.H.; Spain, W.J.; Fairhall, A.L. (19 October 2008). "Fractional differentiation by neocortical pyramidal neurons". Nature Neuroscience. 11 (11): 1335–1342. doi:10.1038/nn.2212. PMC 2596753. PMID 18931665.
• Fairhall, A.L.; Burlingame, C.A.; Narasimhan, R.; Harris, R.A.; Puchalla, J.L.; Berry, M.J. (5 November 2006). "Selectivity for Multiple Stimulus Features in Retinal Ganglion Cells". Journal of Neurophysiology. 96 (5): 2724–2738. doi:10.1152/jn.00995.2005. PMID 16914609. S2CID 52872206.

Awards and honors

• Sloan Fellowship
• McKnight Fellowship
• Burroughs Wellcome Fellowship
• Allen Distinguished Investigator

References

External links

• Laboratory page
• University of Washington Profile page
• Adrienne Fairhall publications indexed by Google Scholar